— Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude, Commander in Chief of British forces in Iraq, after entering Baghdad in March 1917.

According to the best estimates, the dozen years of sanctions following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait led to something like one million deaths in Iraq, including 500,000 children and since the invasion in 2003 a further 650,000 have died as a result of the illegal occupation.

It’s a staggering number of slaughtered people, all done in the name of ‘democracy building’ but it doesn’t stop here, we need to add the slaughtered of the former Yugoslavia and who knows how many massacred in Afghanistan as nobody’s bothering to count. But lest we forget, the invasion and occupation of Vietnam resulted in the slaughter of at least three million Vietnamese and the effects of Agent Orange and the other toxic chemicals dumped on Vietnam is still killing and maiming people to this day.

‘[The] absorption [of Iraq should be] veiled by constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer state, and so on.’

— Lord Curzon, December 12, 1917.

Then we have the ‘liberated’ dead of Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, El Salvador, Haiti, Panama, Angola, Zaire, and a dozen or more additional countries that have ‘benefited’ from US ‘democracy’ to add to the total. Who knows what the exact total is, but it runs into millions of people who have been made democratic and dead and this figure is only the total number who have been ‘liberated’ since the 1960s.

The West and principally the US and the UK has been
‘civilising’ untold millions for decades, indeed for centuries, so the
current mayhem should come as no surprise to us. But what should
surprise and sicken us, is the fact that we in the so-called civilised
world have largely stood by and allowed our governments to destroy
entire countries and cultures and all allegedly in our name.

By and large, those of us who do oppose our barbarian governments’ mass
murder tend to the blame the media for misleading us by delivering the
governments’ message of ‘spreading democracy’ to all those
‘unfortunate’ enough not benefit from ‘our’ way of life. And it’s true,
the media does an excellent hatchet job on reality by dismembering
events into discrete chunks thus removing any relationship between
cause and effect as well as ‘disappearing’ any inconvenient facts that
would undermine the prevailing orthodoxy.

An excellent example of this process in action can be seen by the way
the media presents the ‘sectarian’ violence in Iraq to us by removing
entirely any reference to the fact that none of it would be happening
if we hadn’t invaded and occupied the country in the first place. But
of course logic has absolutely nothing to do with it, if that were so,
we would be getting an entirely different picture of US and UK
‘largesse’ when it came to the delivery of ‘democracy’ to the scores of
countries that have, over the decades, ‘benefited’ from the
‘civilising’ effect of poison gas, mass bombings of civilians, napalm,
Agent Orange, depleted uranium, ‘bunker buster’ bombs, cluster
munitions, Hellfire missiles, to mention just a few of the mechanisms
employed to deliver ‘democracy’ to those allegedly less fortunate than
ourselves.

Anthony Arnove’s new book ‘Iraq: the logic of withdrawal’ documents the
real story in devastating and sickening detail. Any mainstream
journalist worth his credit card debt who covers these situations, who
could continue to do the job of his or her paymaster after reading it,
doesn’t really deserve the title human being let alone journalist, but
hey, we all gotta eat, even the employees of empire.

And it’s a miraculous process to behold, a magician couldn’t carry off
the sleight of hand involved with more skill whereby our presence in
Iraq is transformed from one of occupier and slaughterer of the
innocents into innocent bystander, helpless when confronted by the
‘terrorist’. We are led to believe that all we want to do is bring
peace and democracy to a country that in every respect has been
transformed into a slaughter house by our presence and actions.

Occasionally however, the truth will out but it doesn’t make headlines
nor does it have the slightest impact on media coverage.

‘An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein—and the replacement of
the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely
aligned with the United States … would put America more wholly in
charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even
the Romans,’

wrote David Frum, former
Bush speech writer. Well that’s telling it like it is, but ‘slips’ like
this occur quite regularly, the problem the media has is how to deal
with them? Answer? Simply ignore them and move on. Ignorance is bliss
or so they say.

Arnove’s book is full ‘little treasures’ like the one quoted above and
the fact that the employees of empire actually make such statements
tells us an awful lot about the mindset of the ‘civilised’ people who
utter them. And it goes some way in explaining the almost total
disconnect between ‘us’ and ‘them’ but not entirely, so what gives?

Once again, we have to turn to the relationship between our domestic
populations and empire for do we not benefit in so many ways from the
relationship, not all I agree but a significant percentage that enables
the ruling elites to maintain the fiction of support even if by the
default of inaction.

And why no action? In part it’s explained by the nature of the anti-war
movement which is still heavily imbued with anti-communism and loathe
to be identified with anything that smacks of socialism and all that
that implies.

The one problematic aspect of Arnove’s book is the title; ‘Iraq – the
logic of withdrawal’ because it hinges on the assumption that the
invasion was a strategic mistake that was bound to fail, but is this
true? It hasn’t been a failure for the big corporations who have made
billions in profits from the invasion, nor has it been a strategic
failure as it has opened up the possibility of further ‘adventures’ in
the region including the possible invasion of Iran. It has also
strengthened the hand of conservative forces in the region.

I’m bound to ask the question therefore whether the rise of reactionary
Islam doesn’t suit the purposes of the US perfectly? We should remember
that after the fall of the Shah in 1979 and the possibility of a
progressive ie, anti-imperialist government taking power in Iran, that
the initial response of the US government was to back the Mullahs led
by Khomeini, whose power was threatened by the Left which had led the
overthrow of the Shah.

The Iranian religious establishment, with the backing of the West, and
in particular the US and the UK, launched a horrific attack on
progressive forces torturing, imprisoning and murdering thousands of
mainly young people. This is a particularly important event in
contemporary history that has been entirely ‘disappeared including by
the left.

It also suits the current leadership in Iran to have an external enemy,
the question is, will it backfire? As Arnove points out in relation to
a possible invasion or air attack on Iran in spite of the apparent
lunacy of such a move is the fact that

‘…any bet at this point that relied on the intelligence, rationality, or humanity of U.S. Policy-makers would be an unwise one.’

Thus ‘logic’ in this case depends on who is doing the calculations.
From an imperial perspective there is absolutely nothing logical about
a withdrawal, especially as the vision of a compliant comprador
government in Iraq fades into the distance.

Most critical is the need to maintain control of the region and its
resources, whether by force of arms or through puppets, a point that
Arnove makes over and over again, so how the imperial objectives square
with the idea of the ‘logic of withdrawal’ is not at all clear.

It is perhaps a vain hope but the only solution is for the citizens of
both the US and the UK to resist by all the means at our disposal the
urge to extend the grip of global capital, something that can only be
done by developing a truly progressive alternative to the current
insanity. But without a coherent voice to lead such a movement,
something that for example the ‘Stop the War Coalition’ here in the UK
entirely lacks, it’s not clear how such an opposition can be built.

Yet there are signs albeit lone voices who are at last questioning the
fundamental contradiction of capitalism but it’s coming not from the
anti-war movement but from the environmental or ‘Green’ movement.
Again, the same problems confront the ‘Greens’ as does the anti-war
movement, namely the reluctance to call for the complete abolition of
capitalism and its replacement with a sustainable and human-based
socialism.